![]() Playing on Galton's original term, you might call this vox columbae – or the voice-of-the-pigeons principle.Īlthough all of this may seem to be a bit of feathery fluff, over the past several years our report has resonated across several fields, going beyond pathology and radiology to include the burgeoning realm of artificial intelligence. ![]() Pigeons thus join people in evidencing better wisdom from crowds. However, the accuracy score of the "flock" was 93 percent, thereby exceeding that of every individual bird. The accuracy scores of the four individual pigeons were 73, 79, 81 and 85 percent correct. Pigeons were able to generalize the skill of classifying tissue samples. ![]() Three or four pigeons never incorrectly responded. With an expanded set of breast tissue samples, we assessed the accuracy of each of four pigeons against the "wisdom of the flock," a technique we termed "flock-sourcing." To calculate these "flock" scores, we assigned each trial a score of 100 percent if three or four pigeons correctly responded, and we assigned a score of 50 percent if two pigeons correctly responded. This high level of transfer indicates that rote memorization alone cannot explain the pigeon's categorization proficiency.įinally, we put Google's PigeonRank proposal to the test. We went on to test the pigeons with brand-new images to see if the birds could reliably transfer what they had learned this is the key criterion for claiming that they'd learned a generalized concept of "benign/malignant tissue samples." Accuracy to the familiar training samples averaged around 85 percent correct, and accuracy to the novel testing samples was nearly as high, averaging around 80 percent correct. Granted, this accomplishment falls short of their reading human text – although time will tell if that too is within the ken of pigeons – but the pigeons were quite able to make such highly accurate reports despite considerable variations in the magnification of the slide images. Our research team included a pathologist, a radiologist and two experimental psychologists.Įxploiting the well-established visual and cognitive prowess of pigeons, we taught our birds to peck either a blue or a yellow button on a computerized touchscreen in order to categorize pathology slides that depicted either benign or cancerous human breast tissue samples.Īfter two weeks of training, the pigeons attained accuracy levels ranging between 85 and 90 percent correct. More than a decade later, we integrated elements of this spoof into our own serious research project using a real mini-flock of four pigeons. This so-called PigeonRank system thus rank-ordered a user's search results in accord with the pecking order of Google's suitably schooled birds. The more the flocks of pigeons pecked at a particular website, the higher it rose on the user's results page. It also adapted Victorian polymath Francis Galton's vox populi – or the voice of the people – principle by purportedly putting the web search task to something of a vote. Skinner's operant conditioning playbook by allegedly teaching pigeons to peck for a food reward whenever the birds detected a relevant search result. The prank had taken a page out of 20th-century behaviorist B. ![]() “Win or lose, it’s how we play the game.The joke hinged on the silliness of the premise – but the scenario does have more than a bit of the factual mixed in with the fanciful. “If (our prank) is a complete failure and we’re lost in the noise, leaving us to laugh in our own corner, it was worth it,” said the only PR person who responded to my inquiry re: why oh why they were doing this. Oh, everything on the Internet is lies tomorrow? Well whatever, it’s all lies anyway. Our sensibilities have been eroded by the constant barrage of corporate messaging, drowned by the insipid committee humour and the sheer number of fast-food chains tweeting “bae.” In 1997, the New York Times’ Stuart Elliott hypothesized that that era’s lack of April Fools’ tomfoolery reflected a certain conservative outlook on the part of major brands, “an unwillingness to risk offending consumer sensibilities, which seem these days to be more fragile” than glass.Īlmost 20 years later, we aren’t less fragile, per se, but we are arguably far less sensitive - alerting only to the companies that drone at a slightly higher pitch than their thirsty brethren. ![]()
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